Held to answer

Nothing exposes crime statistics like an honest rap sheet.
Consider the “26 percent” of Oregon prison inmates that the PEW Center on the States has found to be “low risk” and driving up the costs of incarceration.

Who exactly are these 26 percent? Considering that Oregon doesn’t incarcerate most felons, what crimes are these “low-risk” felons committing?

Clackamas County District Attorney John Foote, a member of Oregon’s Commission on Public Safety, has been asking that question for the better part of the summer.

PEW’s experts didn’t know in June. They still didn’t know in July. Neither did Craig Prins, executive director of Oregon’s Criminal Justice Commission, which works closely with PEW and advises the commission that Foote is a member of. (Yes, all these commissions can be confusing. Maybe that’s by design.)

Anyway, Prins and PEW researchers finally realized that Foote wasn’t going to stop asking. They released a list of SID numbers for 850 “low-risk” inmates, along with an explanation on how the list was compiled using an actuarial tool called the Oregon Public Safety Checklist.

There’s SID No. 15627179 and SID No. 18972247 and SID No. 18255985  – and 847 more SIDs.

Those numbers don’t tell you much, do they? Perhaps that was the point.

Foote continued to push. Prins finally offered names and counties of conviction.

When Foote forwarded the lists to his colleagues in the Oregon District Attorneys Association, they tracked down the faces and stories behind these “low-risk” offenders. They produced a 70-page spreadsheet. Here’s a sample of what they found:

SID No. 15627179, Shane Michael Chambers, got drunk then climbed behind the wheel and collided head-on with another vehicle, leaving 20-year-old Larry Ragsdale, a former Lane County track star, with “permanent and profound injuries.” Ragsdale now lives in an adult care facility. Chambers has at least two prior convictions for DUII. In PEW’s world, he is a low-risk offender.

SID No. 10194519, Ervan Herring, a Woodland Park Blood gang member, was on parole in Multnomah County when he fired several shots into a car trying to kill the occupants. Herring has a long criminal history including assaults, being a felon in possession of a firearm, racketeering and hit-and-run. None of that excludes him from being considered a low risk to re-offend.

SID No. 18423951, Leon Joshua Hopper was spotted by witnesses having sex with an unconscious female. At the hospital she was found to have bruises around her neck. Hopper’s Oregon criminal history includes carrying a concealed weapon and assault; his out-of-state record includes strangulation, drunken driving, larceny, burglary and four counts of assault. Because those convictions were out-of-state they are not calculated in his risk score. He was sentenced to 25 months and could be paroled as early as today.

SID No. 18255985, Angela McAnulty starved, tortured and beat her 15-year-old daughter, Jeannette Maples, to death. McAnulty is now on Oregon’s Death Row, but by PEW’s calculations she, too, is a low risk to reoffend.

She isn’t the only Death Row inmate to make the low-risk list. Bruce Turnidge also made the cut. He and his son planted a bomb at a Woodburn bank that killed State Trooper William Hakim and Woodburn Police Capt. Tom Tennant, and cost Police Chief Scott Russell one of his legs.

There are at least 23 other convicted murderers on the low-risk list, along with 34 others convicted of homicide or attempted murder. There are men (and a few women) who have committed assaults, domestic violence, robberies, felony drunk driving, sold or manufactured drugs (sometimes near schools) and broken into people’s homes (in some cases while the occupants were there).

Why would PEW and Prins try to withhold inmate names and their crimes from the public?

Because they want the public to accept the expertise of people like PEW’s Felicity Rose, who insisted that while prison populations are declining in the rest of the nation, “there is a different trend going on in Oregon, a substantial growth you can see in the last couple of years.”

That was her story when she appeared twice this summer before the Commission on Public Safety. She insisted that 40 percent of Oregon’s prison admissions were for medium-risk offenders and 26 percent were for low risk.

Foote initially questioned her on the context of these statistics back in June. Could she break down the criminal history of each individual?  Criminal history has a lot to do with whether someone goes to prison.

No, Rose had no information on criminal history.

Yet she and her colleagues at PEW, with an assist from Prins, have portrayed Oregon as unnecessarily spending hundreds of millions of dollars imprisoning people who don’t need to be locked up.

Their research jibed nicely with what Gov. John Kitzhaber wanted when he appointed the seven-member Commission on Public Safety last year and put then-state Supreme Court Chief Justice Paul DeMuniz in charge. Former Gov. Ted Kulongoski was another member, along with two state representatives, two state senators and a public member.

The commission was to hold four meetings and then file a report. The first two meetings were devoted to complaints about voter-mandated increases in criminal sentences. Things took an unexpected turn at the third meeting when Foote turned up and, flanked by two other prosecutors, spoke under public comment. Foote’s background also includes criminal defense work and corrections.

He suggested that if they were looking for ways to cut prison costs, they might analyze why Oregon’s daily cost to house an inmate is higher than average.

Kulongoski interrupted him to say 67 percent of the costs are labor. (Translation: That’s a union issue, and as a former governor Kulongoski may have had something to do with those labor costs.)

Following criticism from victim’s rights groups and others, Gov. Kitzhaber was forced to expand the commission to include a district attorney, a criminal defense attorney and representatives from law enforcement and corrections.
The Oregon District Attorneys Association (ODAA) selected Foote as their representative.

When he presented commissioners with the ODAA’s 70-page document on low-risk offenders, DeMuniz could barely muster a “Thank you, Mr. Foote, for bringing that information.”

Meanwhile, at the same meeting PEW’s Zoe Towns offered her expertise on still more data, this time on technical violations. She could have saved the round-trip airfare between Oregon and Washington, D.C. and just replayed Rose’s testimony from June and July.

Towns alleged that more offenders were returning to prison on technical violations who had criminal activity, but “not prison-bound criminal activity.” However, she could not say what the activity was.

DeMuniz praised PEW staffers for all they had provided the commission, which it will use when it begins weighing policy changes at its Sept. 24th meeting.

“We have data. That is what you need to make policy decisions …. not based on anecdotes or anything … but data.”

And then DeMuniz dropped this: Although the commission is supposed to be looking at how to cut public safety costs, he has unilaterally decided to take the cost-per-day of incarceration off the table.

“That is beyond our charge … . That is something the legislature and executive branch can take up.”

Foote objected. If the commission can’t look at the cost per day of incarceration, then DeMuniz was taking off the table one of the core drivers in corrections costs – and putting the responsibility on something else.

“Your voice is heard,” DeMuniz replied.

He ended the meeting with one final gush over the PEW staff.

“Your ability to hold the data together … has been very impressive.”

– Pamela Fitzsimmons

Related:

Spinning the Numbers on Public Safety

Deep in the Heart of Oregon